The parts of the heat shield they removed where on the 'tail' that covers the engine bells because after a burn through there would just be empty space and parts already designed for high temps behind it. The wing/flaps were supposed to be fully shielded.
SpaceX Launches, Landings and News
- Thread starter Shadows
- Start date
- Megathread
The parts of the heat shield they removed where on the 'tail' that covers the engine bells because after a burn through there would just be empty space and parts already designed for high temps behind it. The wing/flaps were supposed to be fully shielded.
I hope they use a kick stage with the payload to get to GTO, and not actually try to re-enter Starship from GTO to Earth.
The plan with the Flaps/Wings seems to in part be to move then a little more leeward. So basically trying to get the hinges more into to the wind shadow of the Starship bulk. Maybe other fixes/improvement will also be made to them though. But it seems resolvable enough as such.
As a test goes, this one has definitely given a clear highlight of some of the main things they need to address.
As for mass to orbit, they've already got newer boosters and Starships planned that will have much more capability to orbit, they're hoping the final iteration reaches something like 200 tons to LEO. For instance via new engines they've been developing that are tough enough that they shouldn't need a heat shield protecting them any more, so saving mass there then. Basically they've got lots of improvements still planned for the future But a fully reusable launch system to orbit with reasonable payload fraction does seem like it is pretty challenging and pushing in to the limits of our current engineering abilities. So it won't be surprising if they have a number of problems for awhile still as they go through iterations.
As a test goes, this one has definitely given a clear highlight of some of the main things they need to address.
As for mass to orbit, they've already got newer boosters and Starships planned that will have much more capability to orbit, they're hoping the final iteration reaches something like 200 tons to LEO. For instance via new engines they've been developing that are tough enough that they shouldn't need a heat shield protecting them any more, so saving mass there then. Basically they've got lots of improvements still planned for the future But a fully reusable launch system to orbit with reasonable payload fraction does seem like it is pretty challenging and pushing in to the limits of our current engineering abilities. So it won't be surprising if they have a number of problems for awhile still as they go through iterations.
You can look at the user's guide yourself. 21 tons to GTO with a 185 x 35,786km orbit at 27-deg inclination and 1800 m/s of delta v to go.
Mal-3
Fun Tyrant
Well, they kinda gotta at some point. Remember, the entire reason Starship is built like that is because this is a heavily scaled up version of Mars Direct architecture. The whole point of Starship is to go out to and return from interplanetary space, so the kind of high-velocity entry required from GTO, LTO, MTO etc. should have been accounted for in the design phase. The project's slow carcinization into a space shuttle is more of a side effect of trying to find the money necessary to do it.
Not exactly the Space Shuttle, given that what NASA really wants from SpaceX for now is technically a disposable variant. (HLS is not able to re-enter Earth, and may not be able to return to LEO from the Moon to begin with.) What they do need is Starship's ability to refill propellant in-orbit, as without it, the Artemis program will wind up being a repeat of Apollo. (The fuel depot version of Starship might not need the ability to survive re-entry, that will make it lighter and able to store more propellant.)
Other potential customers aren't too concerned with reusability, as long as Starship can bring up heavy loads at a cheap price. The one firm needing a reusable Starship is mainly SpaceX itself, so that it can scale up Starlink and also handle other customer's satellite launch needs. (A reusable Starship will allow SpaceX to be a borderline monopoly in the satellite launch market for years, and it is also the only economical way to refill the orbiting propellant depot.)
Mal-3
Fun Tyrant
Yes that's what NASA wants, but Starship was not designed for NASA's wants. Or frankly any other customer's wants. The original purpose of Starship is to land on Mars. Everything from the choice of propellant to the shape of the airframe is centered on being able to put a Starship on Mars and return it to Earth. That was how it was sold at the beginning and if it didn't remain a core objective then the design would've changed to something more favorable for a LEO heavy lifter.
Everything else that's happened in the last five-six years - Dear Moon, HLS, Starlink - is all scope creep, spurred by internal pressure to create a market and the owner's unwillingness to cash out enough Tesla stock to pay for the program out of pocket. LIS, carcinization into a space shuttle: this vehicle that initially started as a highly-specialized design is slowly being converted into a do-everything machine out of economic necessity.
Everything else that's happened in the last five-six years - Dear Moon, HLS, Starlink - is all scope creep, spurred by internal pressure to create a market and the owner's unwillingness to cash out enough Tesla stock to pay for the program out of pocket. LIS, carcinization into a space shuttle: this vehicle that initially started as a highly-specialized design is slowly being converted into a do-everything machine out of economic necessity.
Well, the carcinisation started when Elon Musk himself decided that Starship would be used to launch the bigger, heavier Starlink sats. This was before IFT-1.
His signing of the HLS and Starlab contracts shows that he is doubling down on it. If it goes wrong, he has to account for himself...
I don't recall there being any particularly large shifts in design myself, entire setup always assumed you'd have to be able to move a lot of material from ground to LEO. Because you need to get to LEO to do all the other things like in orbit refueling. Or basically it always needed to be a good LEO launcher. The fuel choice was indeed made in part due to Mars, how ever it actually is also one of the best compromise fuels for LEO launchers and many other next gen rockets with no Mars ambitions at all are also targeting it. A drop down from GTO to skim the atmosphere shouldn't be an issue I think, as a high speed atmospheric entry was kind of needed for any planetary insertion anyway I'd have thought. Especially as it always had an allowance for returning to Earth. So I'm not really seeing them having needed to change that much in design, this seems to me more like making specialty variants of the craft inside the abilities it always had.
As such the main problem they've been facing so far I can tell, is that they managed to underestimated how difficult making a fully reusable system was despite knowing from previous version that it was really hard. And due to that they couldn't keep the dead weight down as much as they had hoped. This has led to them using performance increases they're getting from the engine development and some other efforts to get it more back in to line with the specs they initially wanted. When one thinks about it the Falcon 9 greatly increased ability as they improved the tech, more then doubling its mass to orbit in the end I thought. But at the moment for Starship the initially hoped for 150 tons is ultimately projecting towards 200 tons now after they've stretched the vehicle twice and pushed total combined mass to some 10.000 tons when fully fueld. Which I guess is still an improvement but probably well short of what they had once hoped.
At the end of the day, reusability has turned out to be incredibly hard. The margins are really tight and the only 'easy' way of getting some margin back is supersizing the craft so materials/weight lost to things like the tank walls and outer skin is minimized.
Perhaps if detonation engine development was further along that would have allowed for creating more margin in the vehicle and thus not needing to engineer so many weight saving methods in to it it. But it is as it is.
As such the main problem they've been facing so far I can tell, is that they managed to underestimated how difficult making a fully reusable system was despite knowing from previous version that it was really hard. And due to that they couldn't keep the dead weight down as much as they had hoped. This has led to them using performance increases they're getting from the engine development and some other efforts to get it more back in to line with the specs they initially wanted. When one thinks about it the Falcon 9 greatly increased ability as they improved the tech, more then doubling its mass to orbit in the end I thought. But at the moment for Starship the initially hoped for 150 tons is ultimately projecting towards 200 tons now after they've stretched the vehicle twice and pushed total combined mass to some 10.000 tons when fully fueld. Which I guess is still an improvement but probably well short of what they had once hoped.
At the end of the day, reusability has turned out to be incredibly hard. The margins are really tight and the only 'easy' way of getting some margin back is supersizing the craft so materials/weight lost to things like the tank walls and outer skin is minimized.
Perhaps if detonation engine development was further along that would have allowed for creating more margin in the vehicle and thus not needing to engineer so many weight saving methods in to it it. But it is as it is.
This is why I am still hoping someone dusts off the old sea dragon concept and sees if it will work: 500 tons to leo projected!
More generally, I think reusability at the cost of mass fraction is something of a mistake at this point, unless the economics of a refurbished rocket are really that much better than a bigger, dumber, rocket, and a single stage to mars and back design even more so, when specialized launchers, landers, and transfer vehicles can make much more efficient use of their respective mass even if the family in aggregate is heavier.
Until humanity rediscovery its inner Kerbal, stops pussyfooting around, and brings back project Orion, I feel raw amount of mass to orbit, cheap, is still our best bet.
In principle you'd get pretty close to that if you stripped away the reusable features from Starship I guess. It's made of cheap stainless steel and equipped with effectively rather cheap engines. I'm not sure what the total mass to orbit would be with the super stretched version, but considering the reusable mode is projected 200 tons, might be 400 tons or better?
As for reusability, first stage reusability seems to be worthwhile. Everyone is copying that now these days and usually people wouldn't if they didn't think it worked. Making the top part reusable as well is the really hard part though, so we'll have to see how that goes. But it is worth noting the last test did seem some what hopeful on that front, so it does seem like it might be achievable.
- Location
- Michigan
Does the fact that elon has been harrasing Spacex employees count as spacex news? Elon Musk Asked a SpaceX Employee to Have His Babies: Report
NOAA's GOES-U weather satellite was successfully launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy today despite an unfavorable weather forecast, ironically:
spacenews.com
Viewers who stuck around the livestream post-laucnh were treated to a beautiful shot of the Earth being revealed behind the satellite as it was released in realtime:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNO9QTw9dvo
View: https://x.com/NASA_LSP/status/1805784112646492353
Falcon Heavy launches GOES-U weather satellite
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off June 25 carrying the final spacecraft in a series of geostationary weather satellites that features several firsts.
spacenews.com
Article: The Falcon Heavy lifted off from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A at 5:26 p.m. Eastern, 10 minutes into a two-hour window as launch directors found favorable weather despite forecasts the day before that predicted only a 30% chance of acceptable weather.
[ . . . ]
The satellite carries a suite of earth and space science instruments similar to the three previous GOES-R satellites but also includes the Compact Coronagraph (CCOR) instrument for observing the sun. CCOR will monitor the solar corona for flares and coronal mass ejections that affect space weather, taking over for the nearly 30-year-old Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft.
[ . . . ]
The launch also marked the first time that NOAA launched a GOES weather satellite on a SpaceX rocket. The three previous GOES-R satellites all launched on Atlas 5 rockets from United Launch Alliance, but NASA awarded SpaceX a $152.5 million contract for a Falcon Heavy launch of GOES-U in September 2021. ULA withdrew its bid because it had no remaining Atlas rockets available.
Viewers who stuck around the livestream post-laucnh were treated to a beautiful shot of the Earth being revealed behind the satellite as it was released in realtime:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNO9QTw9dvo
View: https://x.com/NASA_LSP/status/1805784112646492353
wow.
- Location
- USA
NASA selects SpaceX to build deorbit vehicle for International Space Station
The contract is worth up to $843 million, not including launch costs.
Well the end of the ISS was coming after all, guess getting ready for it is wise. If remember correctly NASA is moving towards some what more commercial space station after this, like from Axiom, so space presence should continue.
I wonder if this means that in time NASA will have some more free budget for other large projects again. Well assuming Congress doesn't cut the budget to much.
I wonder if this means that in time NASA will have some more free budget for other large projects again. Well assuming Congress doesn't cut the budget to much.
- Location
- Wherever the Beautiful Game takes me
Here's hoping the ISS is replaced by multiple stations that are purpose built for their own projects with astronauts specifically sent with skillsets for those things. Sure rn they're already doing that but as mixed crews in one larger station but surely there's far more value in purpose built for a specific mission stations
Everyone that has plans to build a station is aiming for mixed use. Not only that but they are planing singular stations that get more mixed use as they grow. I mean even on earth when we build a station on Antarctica it is mixed use with mixed crew. Single purpose research/mixed-use stations are very far down the pipeline. Even further then single purpose space manufacturing stations.
Yeah, I am not sure where this positive effect of a single purpose station is supposed to come from, especially considering the insane cost of setting up the support required to actually be able to stay in space for any amount of time. Not sure how specialised moduls with each their own support are going to beat several specialised moduls and a single unified support.
We already send very skilled specialists up there but unless we massively increase the scale of the operation some kind of inter-department crosskilling is the only way to get people up there, keep the station running (including repairs) and conduct complex experiments. And if your are going to make the stations smaller that kind of crossskilling gets more important and not less.
If you want totally focused specialists you should go for a large station with a significant amount of manpower.
We already send very skilled specialists up there but unless we massively increase the scale of the operation some kind of inter-department crosskilling is the only way to get people up there, keep the station running (including repairs) and conduct complex experiments. And if your are going to make the stations smaller that kind of crossskilling gets more important and not less.
If you want totally focused specialists you should go for a large station with a significant amount of manpower.
Last edited:
Mal-3
Fun Tyrant
Theoretically (and we are speaking entirely in the theoretical here) if the amount of mass capable of being launched goes up and the cost per kilo of launching goes down enough, then it becomes more practical to build orbital facilities that can do more complex work with focused specialists instead of having to rely on people with a lot of time-consuming cross training or experiments that can't get quite as involved due to training requirements. Or even just something that's fairly basic (like, as an example that's been around since the 80s, large scale microgravity crystal growth) that might take up too much infra or have problems if tied to a larger facility.
That's the idea/hope, anyway. This is all tied to the Field of Dreams problem and even then is honestly pinning hopes on various industries behaving in a very un-2020s way. We will see, I suppose.
That's the idea/hope, anyway. This is all tied to the Field of Dreams problem and even then is honestly pinning hopes on various industries behaving in a very un-2020s way. We will see, I suppose.
Increasingly specialized facilities over time is certainly possible, but it would presumably take time to spool experience and industrial capacity up for such things. I guess we can see what plans start showing up in the 2030s once some more experience in accrued in the field, as there obviously isn't enough of the 2020s left to get further then a few early stations at most.
It is quite premature to loft so many space stations into orbit, when there is a shortage of reliable and not-so-costly launch platforms to send them up.
Consider the ISS itself. The pressure modules were sent up were sent up by the Space Shuttle and Russian rockets, other member nations would have had a ball of a time launching that many times for assembly. With higher payload rockets, fewer launches are needed, but surprisingly few nations have rockets that can launch much more than 20 tons into LEO.
In the West, right now only SpaceX has the spare launch capacity to lift big portions of space stations into orbit. This is not a conducive scenario for having many specialised space stations, assuming you want at least two launch providers in case one cannot provide a slot. (Note that New Glenn has yet to launch, if it does succeed people may be more inclined to build space stations.)
Consider the ISS itself. The pressure modules were sent up were sent up by the Space Shuttle and Russian rockets, other member nations would have had a ball of a time launching that many times for assembly. With higher payload rockets, fewer launches are needed, but surprisingly few nations have rockets that can launch much more than 20 tons into LEO.
In the West, right now only SpaceX has the spare launch capacity to lift big portions of space stations into orbit. This is not a conducive scenario for having many specialised space stations, assuming you want at least two launch providers in case one cannot provide a slot. (Note that New Glenn has yet to launch, if it does succeed people may be more inclined to build space stations.)
Rocket Lab might be able to get their Neutron rocket to launch next year as well. In which case there would be 3 rockets with Falcon 9 level reusability or better. That would I think give a reasonable basis for expected continued lower cost with multiple providers.
Mal-3
Fun Tyrant
Huh, didn't know Rocket Lab was that far along on the Neutron. Cool. I admit I'm looking forward to Neutron because it's the most Tom Corbette-ass looking rocket since the DCX and I am 100% here for it.
Neutron doesn't really have the volume to do space stations. Neither does falcon 9/heavy either. Even for inflatable habits the only company left that is working on them requires a Vulcan or New Glenn sized payload diameter.
On a related topic Neutron's design also makes it bad for human space flight. You really want the part carrying humans to be outside the fairing so you can do launch escape. The only way around that is flying a metric ton of launches on the to show that your chance at a launch failure is low enough to eat the increased risk from a lack of a fail safe. Or you know you do a shuttle and say fuck those astronauts.
On a related topic Neutron's design also makes it bad for human space flight. You really want the part carrying humans to be outside the fairing so you can do launch escape. The only way around that is flying a metric ton of launches on the to show that your chance at a launch failure is low enough to eat the increased risk from a lack of a fail safe. Or you know you do a shuttle and say fuck those astronauts.
Neutron also had a weird payload target from the start as it was kinda small. When it was first announced all they wanted to do was 8 tons to orbit with a return to launch site landing. They have since stated that because of customer demand they will offer 13 tons with a barge landing and 15 tons expendable. IIRC they didn't want to barge landings as that would increase recovery costs, but had marketed it as a constellation launcher so 8 tons seemed low.